Timebends (25 page)

A vast purple plain blends on the horizon into an orange sunset sky. My bare white foot is lowering into a shallow hole at the bottom of which is a little pool of crystal clear water beneath whose surface are stretched five silvery strings, thick as harp strings. My foot descends and touches them, and the air fills with a bloom of music that even ripples the water. Now in the near distance appears a white concrete wall on the purple plain, and as I approach I see two goatlike fawns walking on their hind legs. They are playing handball against the wall. They are my cousins, Abby and Buddy. The smack of the hard black ball against their forehooves is tremendous, thrilling.

“He wanted a business for us. So we could all work together,” my cousin said. “A business for the boys.”

This conventional, mundane wish was a shot of electricity that switched all the random iron filings in my mind in one direction. A hopelessly distracted Manny was transformed into a man with purpose: he had been trying to make a gift that would crown all those striving years; all those lies he told, all his imaginings and crazy exaggerations, even the almost military discipline he had laid on his boys, were in this instant given form and point. To be sure, a business expressed his own egotism, but love, too. That homely, ridiculous little man had after all never ceased to struggle for a certain victory, the only kind open to him in this society—selling to achieve his lost self as a man with his name and his sons' names on a business of his own. I suddenly understood him with my very blood.

It was an accidental meeting almost a year earlier that had set me up for the particular question I asked and for the resonances of the answer my cousin gave. On a late winter afternoon I had walked into the lobby of the old Colonial Theatre in Boston, where
All My Sons
had just opened, its Broadway premiere a few weeks away, and I was surprised to see Manny among the last of the matinee audience to leave. He had a nice gray overcoat on his arm and his pearl gray hat on his head, and his little shoes were brightly shined, and he had been weeping. It was almost a decade since I had last laid eyes on him. Despite my name on the marquee he clearly had not expected to see me here.

“Manny! How are you? It's great seeing you here!”

I could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from
New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day's business. Without so much as acknowledging my greeting, he said, “Buddy is doing very well.” Then I saw a passing look of embarrassment on his face, as though, perhaps, he had not always wished me well.

We chatted for a moment, and he went out of the vast lobby and into the street. I thought I knew what he was thinking: that he had lost the contest in his mind between his sons and me. An enormous welling sorrow formed in my belly as I watched him merge into the crowd outside. Years later it would seem a spectral contest for a phantom victory and a phantom defeat, but there in the lobby I felt some of my boyhood need of his recognition, my resentment at his disparagements, my envy of his and his sons' freed sexuality, and my contempt for it too. Collected in his ludicrous presence was all of life. And at the same time in some isolated roving molecule of my mind I knew I had imagined all of this and that in reality he was not much more than a bragging and often vulgar little drummer.

But it was the absence of the slightest transition to “Buddy is doing very well” that stuck in my mind; it was a signal to me of the new form that until now I had only tentatively imagined could exist. I had not the slightest idea of writing about a salesman then, totally absorbed as I was in my present production. But how wonderful, I thought, to do a play without any transitions at all, dialogue that would simply leap from bone to bone of a skeleton that would not for an instant cease being added to, an organism as strictly economic as a leaf, as trim as an ant.

And more important than even that, a play that would do to an audience what Manny had done to me in our surprising meeting—cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding another, display past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop.

The past, I saw, is a formality, merely a dimmer present, for everything we are is at every moment alive in us. How fantastic a play would be that did not still the mind's simultaneity, did not allow a man to “forget” and turned him to see present through past and past through present, a form that in itself, quite apart from its content and meaning, would be inescapable as a psychological process and as a collecting point for all that his life in society had poured into him. This little man walking into the street had all my youth inside him, it seemed. And I suppose because I was more conscious than he, I had in some sense already created him.

* * *

But the business at the moment was
All My Sons.

The play had already run in New Haven and had shown its impact, but Elia Kazan continued rehearsing sections of it every day even now, driving it to ever more intensified climaxes, working it like a piece of music that had to be sustained here and hushed there. To keep the cast from routinizing their characters' conflicts, he would stimulate arguments among them by seeming to favor one over the other, seeding little fungi of jealousy that made them compete all over again for his affection. A small, compact man who walked on the balls of his feet, he had the devil's energy and knew how to pay attention to what the writer or his actors were trying to tell him; he could make each actor think he was his closest friend. I think his method, if it can be given so self-conscious a name, was to let the actors talk themselves into a performance. Far more by insinuation than by command, he allowed the actors to excite themselves with their own discoveries, which they would carry back to him like children offering some found object to a parent. And he respected rather than scoffed at actors' childishness, knowing that it was not a grown-up occupation and that the sources of their best inventions were in their earliest years. Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately rather than instruct before the others, sensing that anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment. Unlike Harold Clurman, who adored talking and led his actors by sending them a message of his own amiable helplessness, calling to them, in effect, for rescue, Kazan grinned a lot and said as little as possible. A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back upon himself.

Kazan came from close-knit people of intense feelings, people of clannish propriety and competitiveness who knew that no feeling is alien to man. His most reassuring side, for me, was a natural tendency to seek out the organic and hew to its demands. I believed by this time in a kind of biological play writing—nature abhors the superfluous, and whatever does not actively contribute to the life of an organism is sloughed off. This same predilection may be why Kazan was not suited to Shakespeare and would have his difficulties with Tennessee Williams, who sometimes showed a weakness for verbal adornment for its own sake. In a play, as in personal relations, Kazan knew that the making and the breaking
was done by the needs of people and not by their avowals and disavowals. In the same spirit he listened to music, classical and jazz, seeking to experience what was naked in it and expressive of the composer's secret outcry. He had cast Ed Begley to play the father, Keller, in
All My Sons
not only because Begley was a good actor (although not as yet of great distinction) but because he was a reformed alcoholic and still carried the alcoholic's guilt. Keller is of course a guilty man, although not an alcoholic; thus traits could be matched while their causes were completely unrelated. As Kate Keller he cast a long-unemployed leading lady, Beth Merrill, not only because he thought she could act but because she had a certain pathetic pretension as the last of David Belasco's stars, whom that outlandish genius had forbidden to show herself on the street, putting a chauffeured car at her disposal lest she lose her mystery for the public. Indeed, I had come to the theatre the afternoon I met Manny because we were having a bit of a crisis with her: she had been deeply insulted by what she considered a lack of attention and was talking of quitting. But when I looked in on her in her dressing room after the matinee, she was feeling splendid, and I noticed an immense mass of flowers nearby, which I soon learned Kazan had sent her, in true Belasco style. Kazan had also put on a tie and jacket to present this offering, sensing her longing for some sign of class, however spurious, in the surrounding environment, for we all dressed like steamfitters. On the first day of rehearsal she had glanced at her fellow actors, who looked like street people, and with a grimace of pain had asked Kazan, “Is this the
cast?”

Kazan was already a well-known but far from famous director at this time, still a year away from the mystique that would come with his production of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
and I was almost totally new to the critics and newspaper theatrical columns, so despite very good Boston reviews, the enormous Colonial was never really filled. The Boston audience was still in a condition of what might be called stubborn spiritual stateliness, and it was hard for me to read their largely silent reactions. One tall and dignified man I saw standing in the lobby crowd at the intermission after the second-act curtain was quite visibly shaken by that climax, his eyes red with weeping. To his companion, who had asked what he thought of the play, he muttered through thin, barely moving lips, “I like it.”

Something in the play seemed to have departed from tradition. It is possible that Mordecai Gorelik's set, a disarmingly sunny suburban
house, as well as the designedly ordinary and sometimes jokey atmosphere of the first ten minutes, made the deepening threat of the remainder more frightening than people were culturally prepared for; this kind of placid American backyard was not ordinarily associated, at least in 1947, with murder and suicide. Ward Morehouse, the
New York Sun
drama critic, came up to see the play in New Haven and invited Kazan and me to have a drink with him so that he could ask us straight out, “What's it about?” Coming as it did a few months after the famous producer Herman Shumlin had said, “I don't understand your play,” Morehouse's question mystified me, and I could only grope for an explanation of a story that, to me and Kazan at any rate, was absolutely clear. On top of this, in the coming weeks I would be asked by Jim Proctor, our press agent, to write a piece for the
Times
“to explain the play” and what I was after in writing it. Apart from the embarrassment of presuming to tell critics what to think, I was at a loss as to what needed elucidation.

After the play opened, one recurring criticism was that it was overly plotted, to the point of implausible coincidence. At a crucial moment, Annie produces a letter written to her during the war by her fiancé, the Kellers' son Larry, presumed dead; in the letter Larry declares his intention to commit suicide in his despair at his father's much publicized crime of selling defective plane parts to the army. With one stroke this proves that Larry is indeed dead, freeing Annie to marry Chris, his brother, and at the same time that Joe Keller not only caused the deaths of anonymous soldiers but, in a manner he never imagined, that of his own son. If the appearance of this letter, logical though it might be, was too convenient for our tastes, I wondered what contemporary criticism would make of a play in which an infant, set out on a mountainside to die because it is predicted that he will murder his father, is rescued by a shepherd and then, some two decades later, gets into an argument with a total stranger whom he kills—and who just happens to be not only his father but the king whose place he proceeds to take, exactly as prophesied. If the myth behind
Oedipus
allows us to stretch our commonsense judgment of its plausibility, the letter's appearance in
All My Sons
seems to me to spring out of Ann's character and situation and hence is far less difficult to accept than a naked stroke of fate. But I have wondered if the real issue is the return of the repressed, which both incidents symbolize. Whenever the hand of the distant past reaches out of its grave, it is always somehow
absurd as well as amazing, and we tend to resist belief in it, for it seems rather magically to reveal some unreadable hidden order behind the amoral chaos of events as we rationally perceive them. But that emergence, of course, is the point of
All My Sons
—that there are times when things do indeed cohere.

In later years I began to think that perhaps some people had been disconcerted not by the story but by the play's implication that there could be something of a tragic nature to these recognizable suburban types, who, by extension, were capable of putting a whole world to a moral test, challenging the audience itself. This thought first crossed my mind in 1977 when I visited Jerusalem with my wife, Inge Morath, and saw, a production of tremendous power.
All My Sons
had broken the record by then for length of run by a straight play in Israel, and the audience sat watching it with an intensifying terror that was quite palpable. On our right sat the president of Israel, Ephraim Katzir, on the left the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had arrived late because, as would be announced the next morning, he had just lost his post to Menachem Begin. At the end of the play the applause seemed not to dispel an almost religious quality in the audience's attention, and I asked Rabin why he thought this was so. “Because this is a problem in Israel—boys are out there day and night dying in planes and on the ground, and back here people are making a lot of money. So it might as well be an Israeli play.” I would have added that the authority of the play was enhanced by the performance of Hanna Marron, a very great actress whose leg had been blown off in a terrorist bombing of an El Al flight in Zurich in 1972, the year of the Munich Olympics massacre. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but her disfigurement as the result of war, which of course everyone knew about though her limp barely showed, seemed to add authenticity to Kate Keller's spiritual suffering in another war at a different time.